The sound of a waterfall, an untuned TV set, or a fan in the background : All of these are examples of ‘White noise’ that help you concentrate or get to sleep. They have one thing in common : They are BO-RING .. How about spending 12 hours inside a Starfleet shuttlecraft. Or lounging around in Deckers aapartmentin the movie Bladerunner ? How about falling asleep to the sounds of Dave Bowmans shuttlepod in 2001 a space odyssey ? Crynsknife007 has got just the thing for you. On his Youtube channel he has collected an impressive set of geeky 12 hour sound loops that really help you space out .. or focus. So have a slice of sci-fi inspired white noise and spend your day in the ambient sounds of the Battlestar Galactica engine room or fall asleep to the echoes of the death star. Plenty to choose from. Here is an example.

We go into depth into one of the most powerful command line programs to delve into the treasure chest of cat video’s we call youtube. We explore Youtube-Dl, its capabilities and the vast combination of switches and parameters you can use to turn Youtube (and other video sites) into your personal b*tch.

In day two of our Google Hacking Week we are going to combine an interesting Google search query (or Google Dork) with a command line command to find AND download any file type you want.

Find the storage room in the back of the store.

Websites on the net consist of more then just webpages with information. They also links to files and folders containting interesting information like PDF’s MP3’s and more. Most of the time these files aren’t ‘visible’ when you visit a specific site but our little friends, the Google Search Bots, DO index them. All you need is the right string to find them.

intitle: “index of” <filetypehere> <title/genre/artist>

This search query will tell Google to go look for pages with the title “index of”. These pages usually don’t contain a lot of text, but instead contain links to folders and files. Since you are looking for a specific type of file (like for example mp3’s, Pdf’s or something else) you also can add this to the query. Finally you might be looking for mp3’s of Hanna Montana or Tango’s (I don’t know what you like) : That can also be added to the search string. In the end it will look something like this.

intitle: “index of” mp3 acdc

intitle: “index of” pdf bookkeeping

intitle: “index of” epub scott sigler

So using these queries you might find a real treasure-trove of files and info to download. Some of them might even be behind a login/password page (or even a pay wall) but when the web masters don’t do their homework right .. you can find the ‘good stuff’ this way.

So download them one by one ?

If you are just looking for one specific file you can use your browser to find and download it. If you want to download the ENTIRE collection of files on that page .. you need the power of a command line tool called WGET.

Wget can be found on the command line of both Linux, Mac and even Windows machines. Not all the advanced ‘switches’ we give you in this command below might work on Windows, but you can give it a try. The command is

Replace <filetype> with the type of file you want to download ( .mp3, .pdf, .epub) and <url of website> with the website’s url you found using the Google search. Completed the command might look something like this.

The download is RECURSIVE, so it “deep dives” into all the folders. Beware : This can get you a LOT of data. So make sure you have the bandwidth and the storage capacity before you start sucking down the internet. Good Luck !

We continue switch week on Knightwise.com where we help you to move your data from Apple’s closed ecosystem into something more ‘open’ and cross-platform-friendly. Today we look at iCloud. Apple’s free cloud service for mail, calendar and contacts. But what if you decide you want to quit that Apple ecosystem, or want to migrate your mail to a different account. We show you how.

You don’t need to quit your iCloud account.

First of all : You don’t HAVE to quit your iCloud account. As explained by guest blogger Kevin, there are plenty of applications on Android to access your iCloud contacts, mail and calendar data from a non-Apple phone our tablet. Read his blogpost here.

But what if you want to move out ?

But if you do want to move out of your iCloud account into something like Gmail (or any other service) its not that hard. Apple sticks to some amazingly open standards like iMap for access to their email server from any client. It is exactly that what we are going to use to get your emails out of iCloud. Here is what you need.

This will give you the ability to download all your email messages into your Thunderbird client. You can “drag and drop” your precious emails into offline folders if you want to archive them on your local machine. But what if you want to push them back up to the cloud to Gmail ? Easy peasy. First make sure you have a Gmail account and set that up on your Thunderbird email client.

Set up your Gmail account on Thunderbird.

This is actually quite easy in the latest versions of Thunderbird. Just add an existing email account and enter your Gmail address. Thunderbird is going to figure out the rest.

Now ‘Drag and drop’.

In Thunderbird you now have 2 email accounts set up. What you need to do now is surprisingly simple. Select one (or multiple) emails from your iCloud inbox and drag them over to your Gmail inbox. Its as easy as that. All the metadata (when the email was sent, who the sender was etc etc) is preserved and you now have those mails available in Gmail. (In your Thunderbird client AND on the web)

Closing up.

You can choose to keep your iCloud account and drag emails back and forth, or you can empty the “iCloud-Tank” and move out. In both cases , the open iMAP standard and Thunderbird will serve you well.

knightwise… huh?

Knightwise.com is a cross platform website and podcast that makes technology work for you and not the other way around. The place to go for all geeks who slide between Mac, IOS, Android, Linux and Windows offering an essential mix of hacks, tips, howto's and tweaks spiced up with a dash of geek culture.